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AN ESSAY 
ON COMEDY 



AN ESSAY ON 

COMEDY 

AND THE USES OF THE 
COMIC SPIRIT 



BY 

GEORGE MEREDITH 



SECOND EDITION 



WESTMINSTER 

ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND 

COMPANY. 1898 



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I 



89361 



This Essay was first published in 

c The New Quarterly Magazine' 

for April 1877 



! 



ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

AND OF THE USES OF THE 

COMIC SPIRIT 1 



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Good Comedies are such rare productions, 
that notwithstanding the wealth of our 
literature in the Comic element, it would not 
occupy us long to run over the English list. 
If they are brought to the test I shall pro- 
pose, very reputable Comedies will be found 
unworthy of their station, like the ladies of 
Arthurs Court when they were reduced to 
the ordeal of the mantle. 

There are plain reasons why the Comic 
poet is not a frequent apparition ; and why 
the great Comic poet remains without a 

1 A lecture delivered at the London Institution, 
February 1st, 1877. 



8 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

fellow. A society of cultivated men and 
women is required, wherein ideas are current 
and the perceptions quick, that he may be 
supplied with matter and an audience. The 
semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, 
and feverish emotional periods, repel him ; 
and also a state of marked social inequality 
of the sexes ; nor can he whose business is to 
address the mind be understood where there 
is not a moderate degree of intellectual 
activity. 

Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind 
through laughter, demands more than spright- 
liness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be 
a natal gift in the Comic poet. The substance 
he deals with will show him a startling exhi- 
bition of the dyer's hand, if he is without it. 
People are ready to surrender themselves to 
witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides ; 
all except the head: and it is there that he 
aims. He must be subtle to penetrate. A 
corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome 
him. The necessity for the two conditions 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 9 

will explain how it is that we count him 
during centuries in the singular number. 

'Cest une etrange entreprise que celle de 
faire rire les honnetes gens,' Moliere says; 
and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot 
be over-estimated. 

Then again, he is beset with foes to right 
and left, of a character unknown to the tragic 
and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers. 

We have in this world men whom Rabelais 
would call agelasts; that is to say, non- 
laughers; men who are in that respect as 
dead bodies, which if you prick them do not 
bleed. The old grey boulder- stone that has 
finished its peregrination from the rock to 
the valley, is as easily to be set rolling up 
again as these men laughing. No collision 
of circumstances in our mortal career strikes 
a light for them. It is but one step from 
being agelastic to misogelastic, and the fiiaro- 
7e\o)?, the laughter-hating, soon learns to 
dignify his dislike as an objection in morality. 

We have another class of men, who are 



10 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

pleased to consider themselves antagonists of 
the foregoing, and whom we may term hyper- 
gelasts ; the excessive laughers, ever-laughing, 
who are as clappers of a bell, that may be 
rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so 
loosely put together that a wink will shake 
them. 

e . . . C'est n'estimer rien qu'estimer tout le monde/ 

and to laugh at everything is to have no 
appreciation of the Comic of Comedy. 

Neither of these distinct divisions of non- 
laughers and over-laughers would be enter- 
tained by reading The Rape of the Lock, 
or seeing a performance of Le Tartuffe. In 
relation to the stage, they have taken in our 
land the form and title of Puritan and 
Bacchanalian. For though the stage is no 
longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has 
been revived on it, to give it nobility, we have 
not yet entirely raised it above the contention 
of these two parties. Our speaking on the 
theme of Comedy will appear almost a 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 11 

libertine proceeding to one, while the other 
will think that the speaking of it seriously 
brings us into violent contrast with the 
subject. 

Comedy, we have to admit, was never one 
of the most honoured of the Muses. She was 
in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest 
expression of the little civilization of men. 
The light of Athene over the head of Achilles 
illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy. But 
Comedy rolled in shouting under the divine 
protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as 
Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by 
Aristophanes. Our second Charles was the 
patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy 
of Manners, which began similarly as a com- 
bative performance, under a licence to deride 
and outrage the Puritan, and was here and 
there Bacchanalian beyond the Aristophanic 
example : worse, inasmuch as a cynical licen- 
tiousness is more abominable than frank filth. 
An eminent Frenchman judges from the 
quality of some of the stuff dredged up for 



12 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

the laughter of men and women who sat 
through an Athenian Comic play, that they 
could have had small delicacy in other affairs 
when they had so little in their choice of 
entertainment. Perhaps he does not make 
sufficient allowance for the regulated licence 
of plain speaking proper to the festival of 
the god, and claimed by the Comic poet as 
his inalienable right, or for the fact that it 
was a festival in a season of licence, in a city 
accustomed to give ear to the boldest utter- 
ance of both sides of a case. However that 
may be, there can be no question that the 
men and women who sat through the acting 
of Wycherley's Country Wife were past 
blushing. Our tenacity of national impres- 
sions has caused the word theatre since then 
to prod the Puritan nervous system like a 
satanic instrument; just as one has known 
Anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was re- 
dolent of a sinister smoke, as though they 
had a later recollection of the place than the 
lowing herds. Hereditary Puritanism, regard- 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 13 

ing the stage, is met, to this day, in many 
families quite undistinguished by arrogant 
piety. It has subsided altogether as a power 
in the profession of morality; but it is an 
error to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to 
forget that it had once good reason to hate, 
shun, and rebuke our public shows. 

We shall find ourselves about where the 
Comic spirit would place us, if we stand 
at middle distance between the inveterate 
opponents and the drum-and-fife supporters 
of Comedy: ' Comme un point fixe fait re- 
marquer Temportement des autres, 1 as Pascal 
says. And were there more in this position, 
Comic genius would flourish. 

Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners 
might be imaged in the person of a blowsy 
country girl — say Hoyden, the daughter of 
Sir Tunbelly Clumsy, who, when at home, 
'never disobeyed her father except in the 
eating of green gooseberries ' — transforming 
to a varnished City madam ; with a loud 
laugh and a mincing step ; the crazy ancestress 



14 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

of an accountably fallen descendant. She 
bustles prodigiously and is punctually smart 
in her speech, always in a fluster to escape 
from Dulness, as they say the dogs on the 
Nile-banks drink at the river running to avoid 
the crocodile. If the monster catches her, as 
at times he does, she whips him to a froth, 
so that those who know Dulness only as a 
thing of ponderousness, shall fail to recognise 
him in that light and airy shape. 

When she has frolicked through her five 
Acts to surprise you with the information 
that Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden 
death in the world outside the scenes into 
Lord Aimwell, and can marry the lady in 
the light of day, it is to the credit of her 
vivacious nature that she does not anticipate 
your calling her Farce. Five is dignity with 
a trailing robe ; whereas one, two, or three 
Acts would be short skirts, and degrading. 
Advice has been given to householders, that 
they should follow up the shot at a burglar 
in the dark by hurling the pistol after it, 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 15 

so that if the bullet misses, the weapon may 
strike and assure the rascal he has it. The 
point of her wit is in this fashion supple- 
mented by the rattle of her tongue, and 
effectively, according to the testimony of her 
admirers. Her wit is at once, like steam in 
an engine, the motive force and the warning 
\ whistle of her headlong course; and it vanishes 
like the track of steam when she has reached 
her terminus, never troubling the brains after- 
wards ; a merit that it shares with good wine, 
to the joy of the Bacchanalians. As to this 
wit, it is warlike. In the neatest hands it 
is like the sword of the cavalier in the Mall, 
quick to flash out upon slight provocation, 
and for a similar office — to wound. Com- 
monly its attitude is entirely pugilistic ; two 
blunt fists rallying and countering. When 
harmless, as when the word 'fool' occurs, or 

allusions to the state of husband, it has the 
I 

sound of the smack of harlequin's wand upon 

clown, and is to the same extent exhilarating. 

| Believe that idle empty laughter is the most 



16 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

desirable of recreations, and significant Comedy 
will seem pale and shallow in comparison. 
Our popular idea would be hit by the sculp- 
tured group of Laughter holding both his 
sides, while Comedy pummels, by way of 
tickling him. As to a meaning, she holds 
that it does not conduce to making merry: 
you might as well carry cannon on a racing- 
yacht. Morality is a duenna to be circum- 
vented. This was the view of English Comedy 
of a sagacious essayist, who said that the end 
of a Comedy would often be the commence- 
ment of a Tragedy, were the curtain to 
rise again on the performers. In those old 
days female modesty was protected by a fan, 
behind which, and it was of a convenient 
semicircular breadth, the ladies present in the 
theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to 
peep, covertly askant, or with the option of so 
peeping, through a prettily fringed eyelet- 
hole in the eclipsing arch. 

( Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum. ' — 

Terence. 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 17 

That fan is the flag and symbol of the society 
giving us our so-called Comedy of Manners, 
or Comedy of the manners of South-sea 
Islanders under city veneer ; and as to Comic 
idea, vacuous as the mask without the face 
behind it. 

Elia, whose humour delighted in floating 
a galleon paradox and wafting it as far as it 
would go, bewails the extinction of our arti- 
ficial Comedy, like a poet sighing over the 
vanished splendour of Cleopatra's Nile-barge ; 
and the sedateness of his plea for a cause 
condemned even in his time to the peniten- 
tiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When 
the realism of those ' fictitious half-believed 
personages,' as he calls them, had ceased to 
strike, they were objectionable company, un- 
caressable as puppets. Their artifices are 
staringly naked, and have now the effect of 
a painted face viewed, after warm hours of 
dancing, in the morning light. How could 
the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been 
praised for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, 



18 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

apparently sober, and of high reputation, held 
up their shallow knaveries for the world to 
admire. These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinch- 
wifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy, Hoyden, 
all of them save charming Milamant, are dead 
as last year's clothes in a fashionable fine 
lady's wardrobe, and it must be an exception- 
ably abandoned Abigail of our period that 
would look on them with the wish to appear 
in their likeness. Whether the puppet show 
of Punch and Judy inspires our street- urchins 
to have instant recourse to their fists in a 
dispute, after the fashion of every one of the 
actors in that public entertainment who gets 
possession of the cudgel, is open to question : 
it has been hinted ; and angry moralists have 
traced the national taste for tales of crime 
to the smell of blood in our nursery-songs. It 
will at any rate hardly be questioned that it 
is unwholesome for men and women to see 
themselves as they are, if they are no better 
than they should be : and they will not, when 
they have improved in manners, care much to 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 19 

see themselves as they once were. That comes 
of realism in the Comic art; and it is not 
public caprice, but the consequence of a bet- 
tering state. 1 The same of an immoral may 
be said of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar 
society. 

The French make a critical distinction in 
ce qui remue from ce qui e'meut — that which 
agitates from that which touches with emo- 
tion. In the realistic comedy it is an incessant 
remuage — no calm, merely bustling figures, 
and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way 
of the World, which failed on the stage, there 
was nothing to keep our comedy alive on its 
merits ; neither, with all its realism, true por- 
traiture, nor much quotable fun, nor idea; 
neither salt nor soul. 

The French have a school of stately comedy 
to which they can fly for renovation whenever 
they have fallen away from it ; and their 

1 Realism in the writing is carried to such a pitch in 
The Old Bachelor, that husband and wife use imbecile 
connubial epithets to one another. 



20 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

having such a school is mainly the reason 
why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, they 
know men and women more accurately than 
we do. Moliere followed the Horatian pre- 
cept, to observe the manners of his age and 
give his characters the colour befitting them 
at the time. He did not paint in raw realism. 
He seized his characters firmly for the central 
purpose of the play, stamped them in the 
idea, and by slightly raising and softening the 
object of study (as in the case of the ex- 
Huguenot, Duke de Montausier, 1 for the 
study of the Misanthrope, and, according to 
St. Simon, the Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), 
generalized upon it so as to make it per- 
manently human. Concede that it is natural 
for human creatures to live in society, and 
Alceste is an imperishable mark of one, though 
he is drawn in light outline, without any 
forcible human colouring. Our English school 
has not clearly imagined society ; and of the 

1 Tallemant des Re'aux, in his rough portrait of the 
Duke, shows the foundation of the character of Alceste. 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 21 

mind hovering above congregated men and 
women, it has imagined nothing. The critics 
who praise it for its downrightness, and for 
bringing the situations home to us, as they 
admiringly say, cannot but disapprove of 
Moliere's comedy, which appeals to the indi- 
vidual mind to perceive and participate in the 
social. We have splendid tragedies, we have 
the most beautiful of poetic plays, and we 
have literary comedies passingly pleasant to 
read, and occasionally to see acted. By 
literary comedies, I mean comedies of classic 
inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and 
the Greek New Comedy through Terence; 
or else comedies of the poet's personal con- 
ception, that have had no model in life, and 
are humorous exaggerations, happy or other- 
wise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, 
Massinger, and Fletcher. Massingers Justice 
Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, ( with 
fat capon lined' that has been and will be; 
and he would be comic, as Panurge is comic, 
but only a Rabelais could set him moving 



22 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

with real animation. Probably Justice Greedy 
would be comic to the audience of a country 
booth and to some of our friends. If we have 
lost our youthful relish for the presentation 
of characters put together to fit a type, we 
find it hard to put together the mechanism of 
a civil smile at his enumeration of his dishes. 
Something of the same is to be said of Boba- 
dil, swearing s by the foot of Pharaoh ' ; with 
a reservation, for he is made to move faster, 
and to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholar's 
excogitation of the comic ; that of Massinger 
a moralist's. 

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters 
which are saturated with the comic spirit; 
with more of what we will call blood-life 
than is to be found anywhere out of Shake- 
speare ; and they are of this world, but they 
are of the world enlarged to our embrace 
by imagination, and by great poetic imagina- 
tion. They are, as it were — I put it to suit 
my present comparison — creatures of the 
woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 23 

grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibi- 
tion of the narrower world of society. Jaques, 
Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop 
of Clowns, Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and 
Fluellen — marvellous Welshmen ! — Benedict 
and Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are 
subjects of a special study in the poetically 
comic. 

His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs 
to the literary section. One may conceive 
that there was a natural resemblance between 
him and Menander, both in the scheme and 
style of his lighter plays. Had Shakespeare 
lived in a later and less emotional, less 
heroical period of our history, he might have 
turned to the painting of manners as well 
as humanity. Euripides would probably, in 
the time of Menander, when Athens was 
enslaved but prosperous, have lent his hand 
to the composition of romantic comedy. He 
certainly inspired that fine genius. 

Politically it is accounted a misfortune for 
France that her nobles thronged to the Court 



24 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the 
comic poet. He had that lively quicksilver 
world of the animalcule passions, the huge 
pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his 
eyes in full activity; vociferous quacks and 
snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers, extra- 
vagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad 
grammarians, sonneteering marquises, high- 
flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter- 
threading as in a loom, noisy as at a fair. 
A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish it, 
for the middle class must have the brilliant, 
flippant, independent upper for a spur and 
a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be in- 
wardly dull as well as outwardly correct. 
Yet, though the King was benevolent toward 
Moliere, it is not to the French Court that 
we are indebted for his unrivalled studies 
of mankind in society. For the amusement 
of the Court the ballets and farces were 
written, which are dearer to the rabble 
upper, as to the rabble lower, class than 
intellectual comedy. The French bourgeoisie 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 25 

of Paris were sufficiently quick-witted and 
enlightened by education to welcome great 
works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes, 
and Le Misanthrope, works that were peril- 
ous ventures on the popular intelligence, 
big vessels to launch on streams running to 
shallows. The Tartuffe hove into view as 
an enemy's vessel ; it offended, not Dieu 
mats les devots, as the Prince de Conde 
explained the cabal raised against it to the 
King. 

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance 
of the uses of comedy in teaching the 
world to understand what ails it. The 
farce of the Precieuses ridiculed and put a 
stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made 
popular by certain famous novels. The 
comedy of the Femmes Savantes exposed 
the later and less apparent but more finely 
comic absurdity of an excessive purism in 
grammar and diction, and the tendency to 
be idiotic in precision. The French had 
felt the burden of this new nonsense ; but 



26 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

they had to see the comedy several times 
before they were consoled in their suffering 
by seeing the cause of it exposed. 

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly 
received. Moliere thought it dead. 'I can- 
not improve on it, and assuredly never shall,"' 
he said. It is one of the French titles to 
honour that this quintessential comedy of 
the opposition of Alceste and Celimene was 
ultimately understood and applauded. In 
all countries the middle class presents the 
public which, fighting the world, and with 
a good footing in the fight, knows the world 
best. It may be the most selfish, but that 
is a question leading us into sophistries. 
Cultivated men and women, who do not 
skim the cream of life, and are attached to 
the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, 
make acute and balanced observers. Moliere 
is their poet. 

Of this class in England, a large body, 
neither Puritan nor Bacchanalian, have a 
sentimental objection to face the study of 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 27 

the actual world. They take up disdain of 
it, when its truths appear humiliating : when 
the facts are not immediately forced on 
them, they take up the pride of incredulity. 
They live in a hazy atmosphere that they 
suppose an ideal one. Humorous writing 
they will endure, perhaps approve, if it 
mingles with pathos to shake and elevate 
the feelings. They approve of Satire, be- 
cause, like the beak of the vulture, it smells 
of carrion, which they are not. But of 
Comedy they have a shivering dread, for 
Comedy enfolds them with the wretched host 
of the world, huddles them with us all in 
an ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used 
by any exalted variety as a scourge and a 
broom. Nay, to be an exalted variety is 
to come under the calm curious eye of the 
Comic spirit, and be probed for what you 
are. Men are seen among them, and very 
many cultivated women. You may distin- 
guish them by a favourite phrase : ' Surely 
we are not so bad ! ' and the remark : ' If 



28 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

that is human nature, save us from it! 1 as 
if it could be done : but in the peculiar 
Paradise of the wilful people who will not 
see, the exclamation assumes the saving 
grace. 

Yet should you ask them whether they 
dislike sound sense, they vow they do not. 
And question cultivated women whether it 
pleases them to be shown moving on an 
intellectual level with men, they will answer 
that it does; numbers of them claim the 
situation. Now, Comedy is the fountain of 
sound sense; not the less perfectly sound 
on account of the sparkle : and Comedy 
lifts women to a station offering them free 
play for their wit, as they usually show it, 
when they have it, on the side of sound 
sense. The higher the Comedy, the more 
prominent the part they enjoy in it. Dorine 
in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, 
though palpably a waiting-maid. Celimene 
is undisputed mistress of the same attribute 
in the Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 29 

Alceste as man. In Congreve's Way of the 
World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the 
sprightliest male figure of English comedy. 

But those two ravishing women, so copious 
and so choice of speech, who fence with men 
and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it 
not preferable to be the pretty idiot, the 
passive beauty, the adorable bundle of ca- 
prices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of 
romantic and sentimental fiction? Our 
women are taught to think so. The Agnes 
of the Ecole des Femmes should be a lesson 
for men. The heroines of Comedy are like 
women of the world, not necessarily heartless 
from being clear-sighted : they seem so to 
the sentimentally-reared only for the reason 
that they use their wits, and are not wan- 
dering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. 
Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with 
men, and that of men with them: and as 
the two, however divergent, both look on 
one object, namely, Life, the gradual simi- 
larity of their impressions must bring them 



30 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares 
to show us men and women coming to this 
mutual likeness; he is for saying that when 
they draw together in social life their minds 
grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns 
the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl 
is marched away to the nursery. Philosopher 
and Comic poet are of a cousinship in the 
eye they cast on life: and they are equally 
unpopular with our wilful English of the 
hazy region and the ideal that is not to be 
disturbed. 

Thus, for want of instruction in the Comic 
idea, we lose a large audience among our 
cultivated middle class that we should ex- 
pect to support Comedy. The sentimentalist 
is as averse as the Puritan and as the 
Bacchanalian. 

Our traditions are unfortunate. The public 
taste is with the idle laughers, and still in- 
clines to follow them. It may be shown by 
an analysis of Wycherley's Plain Dealer, a 
coarse prose adaption of the Misanthrope, 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 31 

stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized 
theme to hit the mark of English appe- 
tite, that we have in it the keynote of the 
Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere tra- 
vestied, with the hoof to his foot and hair 
on the pointed tip of his ear. And how diffi- 
cult it is for writers to disentangle themselves 
from bad traditions is noticeable when we find 
Goldsmith, who had grave command of the 
Comic in narrative, producing an elegant 
farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was 
a master of the Comic both in narrative and 
in dialogue, not even approaching to the pre- 
sentable in farce. 

These bad traditions of Comedy affect us 
not only on the stage, but in our literature, 
and may be tracked into our social life. 
They are the ground of the heavy moralizings 
by which we are outwearied, about Life as a 
Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, 1 when popular 

1 See Tom Jones, book viii. chapter 1, for Fielding's 
opinion of our Comedy. . But he puts it simply ; not 
as an exercise in the quasi-philosophical bathetic. 



32 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

writers, conscious of fatigue in creativeness, 
desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism : 
perversions of the idea of life, and of 
the proper esteem for the society we have 
wrested from brutishness, and would carry 
higher. Stock images of this description are 
accepted by the timid and the sensitive, as 
well as by the saturnine, quite seriously ; for 
not many look abroad with their own eyes, 
fewer still have the habit of thinking for 
themselves. Life, we know too well, is not a 
Comedy, but something strangely mixed; 
nor is Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted 
importation from France was noxious ; a noble 
entertainment spoilt to suit the wretched 
taste of a villanous age ; and the later imita- 
tions of it, partly drained of its poison and 
made decorous, became tiresome, notwith- 
standing their fun, in the perpetual recurring 
of the same situations, owing to the absence 
of original study and vigour of conception. 
Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no 
doubt, to the fact of our not producing matter 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 33 

for original study, is repeated in succession 
by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as 
it is at second hand, we have it done cynically 
— or such is the tone ; in the manner of ' below 
stairs. 1 Comedy thus treated may be ac- 
cepted as a version of the ordinary worldly 
understanding of our social life ; at least, in 
accord with the current dicta concerning it. 
The epigrams can be made; but it is un- 
instructive, rather tending to do disservice. 
Comedy justly treated, as you find it in 
Moliere, whom we so clownishly mishandled, 
the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous re- 
flection upon life. It is deeply conceived, in the 
first place, and therefore it cannot be impure. 
Meditate on that statement. Never did man 
wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice, but his 
consummate self-mastery is not shaken while 
administering it. TartufFe and Harpagon, in 
fact, are made each to whip himself and his 
class, the false pietists, and the insanely covet- 
ous. Moliere has only set them in motion. 
He strips Folly to the skin, displays the 



34 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

imposture of the creature, and is content to 
offer her better clothing, with the lesson 
Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Belise. He 
conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the 
simplest language, the simplest of French verse. 
The source of his wit is clear reason : it is a 
fountain of that soil ; and it springs to vin- 
dicate reason, common-sense, Tightness and 
justice ; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is 
of such pervading spirit that it inspires a 
pun with meaning and interest. 1 His moral 
does not hang like a tail, or preach from one 
character incessantly cocking an eye at the 
audience, as in recent realistic French Plays : 
but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with 
every pulsation of an organic structure. If 
Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there 
is no scandal in the comparison. 

1 Femmes Savantes : 

Belise : Veux-tu toute la vie offenser la gram- 
maire ? 

Martine : Qui parle d'offenser grand'mere ni 
grand-pere ? ' 

The pun is delivered in all sincerity, from the mouth 
of a rustic. 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 35 

Congreve , s Way of the World is an excep- 
tion to our other comedies, his own among 
them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy 
of the writing, and the figure of Millamant. 
The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the 
stale one, that so the world goes ; and it con- 
cludes with the jaded discovery of a document 
at a convenient season for the descent of the 
curtain. A plot was an afterthought with 
Congreve. By the help of a wooden villain 
(Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, 
he gets a sort of plot in The Double Dealer. 1 
His Way of the World might be called The 
Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant 
is a perfect portrait of a coquette, both in her 
resistance to Mirabel and the manner of her 
surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit 
here is not so salient as in certain passages of 

1 Maskwell seems to have been carved on the model 
of Iago, as by the hand of an enterprising urchin. He 
apostrophizes his ' invention ' repeatedly. { Thanks, 
my invention.' He hits on an invention, to say : 
' Was it my brain or Providence? no matter which/ 



36 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness 
or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices 
in the harmlessness of wounds to a woman's 
virtue, if she 6 keeps them from air/ In The 
Way of the World, it appears less prepared in 
the smartness, and is more diffused in the 
more characteristic style of the speakers. 
Here, however, as elsewhere, his famous wit is 
like a bully-fencer, not ashamed to lay traps 
for its exhibition, transparently petulant for 
the train between certain ordinary words and 
the powder-magazine of the improprieties to 
be fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with 
Moliere's. That of the first is a Toledo blade, 
sharp, and wonderfully supple for steel ; cast 
for duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so 
pretty when out of it. To shine, it must 
have an adversary. Moliere's wit is like a 
running brook, with innumerable fresh lights 
on it at every turn of the wood through which 
its business is to find a way. It does not run 
in search of obstructions, to be noisy over 
them; but when dead leaves and viler sub- 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 31 

stances are heaped along the course, its natural 
song is heightened. Withojut^effort, and with 
no dazzling flashes of achievement, it is full of 
healing, the wit of good breeding, the wit of 
wisdom. 

• Genuine humour and true wit, 1 says 
Landor, 1 ( require a sound and capacious mind, 
which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La 
Fontaine are recorded by their countrymen to 
have been reveurs. Few men have been graver 
than Pascal. Few men have been wittier.' 

To apply the citation of so great a brain as 
Pascal's to our countryman would be unfair. 
Congreve had a certain soundness of mind ; of 
capacity, in the sense intended by Landor, he 
had little. Judging him by his wit, he per- 
formed some happy thrusts, and taking it for 
genuine, it is a surface wit, neither rising from 
a depth nor flowing from a spring. 

' On voit qu'il se travaille a dire de bous mots. ' 

He drives the poor hack word, ; fool, 1 as 

1 Imaginary Conversations : Alfieri and the Jew 
Salomon. 



38 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

cruelly to the market for wit as any of his 
competitors. Here is an example, that has 
been held up for eulogy : 

Witwoud : He has brought me a letter from 
the fool my brother, etc. etc. 

Mirabel : A fool, and your brother, Wit- 
woud ? 

Witwoud : Ay, ay, my half-brother. My 
half-brother he is ; no nearer, upon my 
honour. 

Mirabel : Then 'tis possible he may be but 
half a fool. 

By evident preparation. This is a sort of 
wit one remembers to have heard at school, 
of a brilliant outsider ; perhaps to have been 
guilty of oneself, a trifle later. It was, no 
doubt, a blaze of intellectual fireworks to the 
bumpkin squire, who came to London to go 
to the theatre and learn manners. 

Where Congreve excels all his English 
rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness 
of style peculiar to him. He had correct 
judgement, a correct ear, readiness of illustra- 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 39 

tion within a narrow range, in snapshots of the 
obvious at the obvious, and copious language. 
He hits the mean of a fine style and a natural 
in dialogue. He is at once precise and 
voluble. If you have ever thought upon style 
you will acknowledge it to be a signal accom- 
plishment. In this he is a classic, and is 
worthy of treading a measure with Moliere. 
The Way of the World may be read out cur- 
rently at a first glance, so sure are the accents 
of the emphatic meaning to strike the eye, 
perforce of the crispness and cunning polish of 
the sentences. You have not to look over 
them before you confide yourself to him ; he 
will carry you safe. Sheridan imitated, but 
was far from surpassing him. The flow of 
boudoir Billingsgate in Lady Wishfort is 
unmatched for the vigour and pointedness 
of the tongue. It spins along with a final 
ring, like the voice of Nature in a fury, and 
is, indeed, racy eloquence of the elevated 
fishwife. 

Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable 



40 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

heroine. It is a piece of genius in a writer 
to make a woman's manner of speech por- 
tray her. You feel sensible of her presence 
in every line of her speaking. The stipula- 
tions with her lover in view of marriage, 
her fine lady's delicacy, and fine lady's easy 
evasions of indelicacy, coquettish airs, and 
playing with irresolution, which in a com- 
mon maid would be bashfulness, until she 
submits to 6 dwindle into a wife,' as she says, 
form a picture that lives in the frame, and 
is in harmony with Mirabel's description of 
her: 

'Here she comes, i' faith, full sail, with 
her fan spread, and her streamers out, and 
a shoal of fools for tenders.' 

And, after an interview : 

s Think of you ! To think of a whirlwind, 
though 'twere in a whirlwind, were a case 
of more steady contemplation, a very tran- 
quillity of mind and mansion.' 

There is a picturesqueness, as of Millamant 
and no other, in her voice, when she is en- 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 41 

couraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall. 
who is " sure she has a mind to him , : 

Millamant: Are you? I think I have — 
and the horrid man looks as if he thought 
so too, etc. etc. 

One hears the tones, and sees the sketch 
and colour of the whole scene in reading 
it. 

Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness. 
An air of bewitching whimsicality hovers 
over the graces of this Comic heroine, like 
the lively conversational play of a beautiful 
mouth. 

But in wit she is no rival of Celimene. 
What she utters adds to her personal witchery, 
and is not further memorable. She is a flash- 
ing portrait, and a type of the superior ladies 
who do not think, not of those who do. In 
representing a class, therefore, it is a lower 
class, in the proportion that one of Gains- 
borough's full-length aristocratic women is 
below the permanent impressiveness of a 
fair Venetian head. 



42 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

Millamant side by side with Celimene is 
an example of how far the realistic painting 
of a character can be carried to win our 
favour ; and of where it falls short. Celimene 
is a woman's mind in movement, armed with 
an ungovernable wit ; with perspicacious clear 
eyes for the world, and a very distinct know- 
ledge that she belongs to the world, and is 
most at home in it. She is attracted to 
Alceste by her esteem for his honesty; she 
cannot avoid seeing where the good sense of 
the man is diseased. 

Rousseau, in his letter to D'Alembert on 
the subject of the Misanthrope, discusses 
the character of Alceste, as though Moliere 
had put him forth for an absolute example 
of misanthropy ; whereas Alceste is only a 
misanthrope of the circle he finds himself 
placed in : he has a touching faith in the 
virtue residing in the country, and a critical 
love of sweet simpleness. Nor is he the 
principal person of the comedy to which he 
gives a name. He is only passively comic 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 43 

Celimene is the active spirit. While he is 
denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed 
upon her to make the best of him, and 
control herself, as much as a witty woman, 
eagerly courted, can do. By appreciating 
him she practically confesses her faultiness, 
and she is better disposed to meet him half 
way than he is to bend an inch : only she 
is une dme de vingt a?is, the world is plea- 
sant, and if the gilded flies of the Court 
are silly, uncompromising fanatics have their 
ridiculous features as well. Can she aban- 
don the life they make agreeable to her, 
for a man who will not be guided by the 
common sense of his class; and who insists 
on plunging into one extreme — equal to 
suicide in her eyes — to avoid another ? That 
is the comic question of the Misanthrope. 
Why will he not continue to mix with the 
world smoothly, appeased by the flattery of 
her secret and really sincere preference of 
him, and taking his revenge in satire of it, 
as she does from her own not very lofty 



44 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

standard, and will by and by do from his 
more exalted one ? 

Celimene is worldliness : Alceste is unworld- 
liness. It does not quite imply unselfishness ; 
and that is perceived by her shrewd head. 
Still he is a very uncommon figure in her 
circle, and she esteems him, Thomme aux 
rubans verts, 'who sometimes diverts but 
more often horribly vexes her," 1 as she can 
say of him when her satirical tongue is on 
the run. Unhappily the soul of truth in 
him, which wins her esteem, refuses to be 
tamed, or silent, or unsuspicious, and is the 
perpetual obstacle to their good accord. He 
is that melancholy person, the critic of every- 
body save himself; intensely sensitive to the 
faults of others, wounded by them; in love 
with his own indubitable honesty, and with 
his ideal of the simpler form of life be- 
fitting it: qualities which constitute the 
satirist. He is a Jean Jacques of the Court. 
His proposal to Celimene when he pardons 
her, that she should follow him in flying 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 45 

humankind, and his frenzy of detestation of 
her at her refusal, are thoroughly in the 
mood of Jean Jacques. He is an impractic- 
able creature of a priceless virtue ; but Celi- 
mene may feel that to fly with him to the 
desert : that is from the Court to the country 

c Ou d'etre homme d'honneur on ait la liberte/ 

she is likely to find herself the companion 
of a starving satirist, like that poor princess 
who ran away with the waiting-man, and 
when both were hungry in the forest, t was 
ordered to give him flesh. She is a fieffee 
coquette, rejoicing in her wit and her attrac- 
tions, and distinguished by her inclination 
for Alceste in the midst of her many other 
lovers; only she finds it hard to cut them 
off — what woman with a train does not? — 
and when the exposure of her naughty wit 
has laid her under their rebuke, she will do 
the utmost she can : she will give her hand 
to honesty, but she cannot quite abandon 
worldliness. She would be unwise if she did. 



46 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

The fable is thin. Our pungent contrivers 
of plots would see no indication of life in 
the outlines. The life of the comedy is in 
the_ idea. As with the singing of the sky- 
lark out of sight, you must love the bird 
to be attentive to the song, so in this 
highest flight of the Comic Muse, you must 
love pure Comedy warmly to understand the 
Misanthrope : you must be receptive of the 
idea of Comedy. And to love Comedy you 
must know the real world, and know men 
and women well enough not to expect too 
much of them, though you may still hope 
for good. 

Menander wrote a comedy called Misogynes, 
said to have been the most celebrated of his 
works. This misogynist is a married man, 
according to the fragment surviving, and is 
a hater of women through hatred of his 
wife. He generalizes upon them from the 
example of this lamentable adjunct of his 
fortunes, and seems to have goc the worst 
of it in the contest with her, which is like 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 47 

the issue in reality, in the polite world. 
He seems also to have deserved it, which 
may be as true to the copy. But we are 
unable to say whether the wife was a good 
voice of her sex: or how far Menander in 
this instance raised the idea of woman from 
the mire it was plunged into by the comic 
poets, or rather satiric dramatists, of the 
middle period of Greek Comedy preceding 
him and the New Comedy, who devoted their 
wit chiefly to the abuse, and for a diversity, 
to the eulogy of extra-mural ladies of con- 
spicuous fame. Menander idealized them 
without purposely elevating. He satirized 
a certain Thais, and his Thais of the 
Eunuchus of Terence is neither profession- 
ally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of 
the two Andrians, Chrysis and her sister, is 
nowhere to be matched for tenderness. But 
the condition of honest women in his day 
did not permit of the freedom of action and 
fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and conse- 
quently it is below our mark of pure Comedy. 



48 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menan- 
der, saying : For the love of me love Terence. 
It is through love of Terence that moderns 
are able to love Menander ; and what is pre- 
served of Terence has not apparently given us 
the best of the friend of Epicurus. Miaovfievo? 
the lover taken in horror, and HepLKeipofjuivrj 
the damsel shorn of her locks, have a pro- 
mising sound for scenes of jealousy and a too 
masterful display of lordly authority, leading 
to regrets, of the kind known to intemperate 
men who imagined they were fighting with 
the weaker, as the fragments indicate. 

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are 
derived from Menander; two, the Hecyra 
and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These 
two are inferior in comic action and the 
peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, 
the Adelphi, the Heautontimorumenus, and 
the Eunuchus : but Phormio is a more dash- 
ing and amusing convivial parasite than the 
Gnatho of the last-named comedy. There 
were numerous rivals of whom we know next 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 49 

to nothing — except by the quotations of 
Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the Greek 
grammarians who cited them to support a 
dictum — in this as in the preceding periods 
of comedy in Athens, for Menander's plays are 
counted by many scores, and they were crowned 
by the prize only eight times. The favourite 
poet with critics, in Greece as in Rome, was 
Menander ; and if some of his rivals here and 
there surpassed him in comic force, and out- 
stripped him in competition by an appositeness 
to the occasion that had previously in the 
same way deprived the genius of Aristophanes 
of its due reward in Clouds and Birds, his 
position as chief of the comic poets of his age 
was unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily 
drags Aristophanes into a comparison with 
him, to the confusion of the older poet. Their 
aims, the matter they dealt in, and the times, 
were quite dissimilar. But it is no wonder 
that Plutarch, writing when Athenian beauty 
of style was the delight of his patrons, should 
rank Menander at the highest. In what 
D 



50 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander, 
whether, as he states of the passage in the 
Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo 
in the lovelier scenes — the description of the 
last words of the dying Andrian, and of her 
funeral, for instance — remains conjectural. For 
us Terence shares with his master the praise 
of an amenity that is like Elysian speech, 
equable and ever gracious; like the face of 
the Andrian's young sister : 

f Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra. ' 

The celebrated 'flens quam familiariter," of 
which the closest rendering grounds hopelessly 
on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful con- 
fidingness of a young girl who has lost her 
sister and dearest friend, and has but her lover 
left to her ; 6 she turned and flung herself on 
his bosom, weeping as though at home there ' : 
this our instinct tells us must be Greek, 
though hardly finer in Greek. Certain lines 
of Terence, compared with the original frag- 
ments, show that he embellished them ; but his 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 51 

taste was too exquisite for him to do other 
than devote his genius to the honest transla- 
tion of such pieces as the above. Menander, 
then ; with him, through the affinity of sym- 
pathy, Terence ; and Shakespeare and Moliere 
have this beautiful translucency of language : 
and the study of the comic poets might be 
recommended, if for that only. 

A singular ill fate befell the writings of 
Menander. What we have of him in Terence 
was chosen probably to please the cultivated 
Romans ; 1 and is a romantic play with a comic 
intrigue, obtained in two instances, the Andria 
and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his 
originals into one. The titles of certain of 
the lost plays indicate the comic illumining 
character; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser, an 
Ill-tempered man, a Superstitious, an Incredu- 
lous, etc., point to suggestive domestic themes. 

1 Terence did not please the rough old conservative 
Romans ; they liked Plautus better, and the recurring 
mention of the vetus poeta in his prologues, who 
plagued him with the crusty critical view of his pro- 
ductions, has in the end a comic effect on the reader. 



52 THE IDEA OF COxMEDY 

Terence forwarded manuscript translations 
from Greece, that suffered shipwreck ; he, who 
could have restored the treasure, died on the 
way home. The zealots of Byzantium com- 
pleted the work of destruction. So we have 
the four comedies of Terence, numbering six 
of Menander, with a few sketches of plots — 
one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, 
whom we should have liked to contrast with 
Harpagon — and a multitude of small frag- 
ments of a sententious cast, fitted for quota- 
tion. Enough remains to make his greatness 
felt. 

Without undervaluing other writers of 
Comedy, I think it may be said that Menander 
and Moliere stand alone specially as comic 
poets of the feelings and the idea. In each of 
them there is a conception of the Comic that 
refines even to pain, as in the Menedemus of 
the Heautontimorumenus, and in the Misan- 
thrope. Menander and Moliere have given 
the principal types to Comedy hitherto. The 
Micio and Demea of the Adelphi, with their 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 53 

opposing views of the proper management of 
youth, are still alive ; the Sganarelles and 
Arnolphes of the Ecole des Maris and the 
Ecole des Femmes, are not all buried. Tartuffe 
is the father of the hypocrites ; Orgon of the 
dupes ; Thraso, of the braggadocios ; Alceste 
of the ' Manlys , ; Davus and Syrus of the 
intriguing valets, the Scapins and Figaros. 
Ladies that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, 
whose language wears the nodding plumes of 
intellectual conceit, are traceable to Philaminte 
and Belise of the Femmes Savantes ; and the 
mordant witty women have the tongue of 
Celimene. The reason is, that these two 
poets idealized upon life: the foundation of 
their types is real and in the quick, but they 
painted with spiritual strength, which is the 
solid in Art. 

The idealistic conception of Comedy gives 
breadth and opportunities of daring to Comic 
genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it 
creates. How, for example, shall an audience 
be assured that an evident and monstrous dupe 



54> THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

is actually deceived without being an absolute 
fool ? In Le Tartuffe the note of high Comedy 
strikes when Orgon on his return home hears 
of his idoFs excellent appetite. ' Le pauvre 
homrne!'* he exclaims. He is told that the 
wife of his bosom has been unwell. ' Et Tar- 
tuffe ? ' he asks, impatient to hear him spoken 
of, his mind suffused with the thought of 
Tartuffe, crazy with tenderness, and again he 
croons, ' Le pauvre homme ! ' It is the mother's 
cry of pitying delight at a nurse's recital of the 
feats in young animal gluttony of her cherished 
infant. After this masterstroke of the Comic, 
you not only put faith in Orgon's roseate pre- 
possession, you share it with him by comic 
sympathy, and can listen with no more than 
a tremble of the laughing muscles to the 
instance he gives of the sublime humanity of 
Tartuffe : 

( Un rien presque suffit pour le scandalise^ 
Jusque-la, qu'il se vint l'autre jour accuser 
D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere, 
Et de l'avoir tuee avec trop de colere.' 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 55 

And to have killed it too wrathfully ! Trans- 
lating Moliere is like humming an air one has 
heard performed by an accomplished violinist 
of the pure tones without flourish. 

Orgon, awakening to find another dupe in 
Madame Pernelle, incredulous of the revela- 
tions which have at last opened his own 
besotted eyes, is a scene of the double Comic, 
vivified by the spell previously cast on the 
mind. There we feel the power of the poet's 
creation ; and in the sharp light of that 
sudden turn the humanity is livelier than any 
realistic work can make it. 

Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tar- 
tuffe ; but they may be found in Boccaccio, 
as well as in Machiavelli's Mandragola. The 
Frate Timoteo of this piece is only a very oily 
friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue with 
ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) 
for payment. Frate Timoteo has a fine 
Italian priestly pose. 

Donna: Credete voi, chel Turco passi 
questo anno in Italia ? 



56 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

F. Tim. : Se voi nonfate orazione, si. 

Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and 
trickeries and casuistries, cannot be painted 
without our discovering a likeness in the 
long Italian gallery. Goldoni sketched the 
Venetian manners of the decadence of the 
Republic with a French pencil, and was an 
Italian Scribe in style. 

The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies 
as that which furnished the idea of the 
Menteur to Corneille. But you must force 
yourself to believe that this liar is not forcing 
his vein when he piles lie upon lie. There is 
no preceding touch to win the mind to credu- 
lity. Spanish Comedy is generally in sharp 
outline, as of skeletons ; in quick movement, as 
of marionnettes. The Comedy might be per- 
formed by a troop of the corps de ballet ; and 
in the recollection of the reading it resolves 
to an animated shuffle of feet. It is, in fact, 
something other than the true idea of Comedy. 
Where the sexes are separated, men and 
women grow, as the Portugese call it, affaima- 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 57 

dos of one another, famine-stricken ; and all 
the tragic elements are on the stage. Don 
Juan is a comic character that sends souls 
flying : nor does the humour of the breaking 
of a dozen women's hearts conciliate the Comic 
Muse with the drawing of blood. 

German attempts at Comedy remind one 
vividly of Heine's image of his country in the 
dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his 
hand at it, with a sobering effect upon readers. 
The intention to produce the reverse effect is 
just visible, and therein, like the portly graces 
of the poor old Pyrenean Bear poising and 
twirling on his right hind-leg and his left, 
consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter gives the 
best edition of the German Comic in the con- 
trast of Siebenkas with his Lenette. A light of 
the Comic is in Goethe ; enough to complete 
the splendid figure of the man, but no more. 

The German literary laugh, like the timed 
awakenings of their Barbarossa in the hollows 
of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather 
monstrous — never a laugh of men and women 



58 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

in concert. It comes of unrefined abstract 
fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the 
peculiar humours of their little earthmen. 
Spiritual laughter they have not yet attained 
to : sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. 
Here and there a Volkslied or Marchen shows 
a national aptitude for stout animal laughter ; 
and we see that the literature is built on it, 
which is hopeful so far ; but to enjoy it, to 
enter into the philosophy of the Broad Grin, 
that seems to hesitate between the skull and the 
embryo, and reaches its perfection in breadth 
from the pulling of two square fingers at the 
corners of the mouth, one must have aid of 
4 the good Rhine wine, 1 and be of German 
blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch 
lumbersomeness of the Comic spirit is of it- 
self exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and the 
poor voice allowed to women in German 
domestic life will account for the absence of 
comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that 
land. I shall speak of it again in the second 
section of this lecture. 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 59 

Eastward you have total silence of Comedy 
among a people intensely susceptible to 
laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. 
Where the veil is over women's faces, you can- ! 
not have society, without which the senses 
are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven 
to the gutters of grossness to slake its thirst. 
Arabs in this respect are worse than Italians \ 
— much worse than Germans; just in the 
degree that their system of treating women 
is worse. 

M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent 
French essayist and master of critical style, 
tells of a conversation he had once with an 
Arab gentleman on the topic of the different 
management of these difficult creatures in 
Orient and in Occident : and the Arab spoke 
in praise of many good results of the greater 
freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and the 
charm of conversing with them. He was 
questioned why his countrymen took no 
measures to grant them something of that 
kind of liberty. He jumped out of his in- 



60 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

dividuality in a twinkling, and entered into 
the sentiments of his race, replying, from the 
pinnacle of a splendid conceit, with affected 
humility of manner : ' You can look on them 
without perturbation — but weV . . . And 
after this profoundly comic interjection, he 
added, in deep tones, 'The very face of a 
woman ! ' Our representative of temperate 
notions demurely consented that the Arab's 
pride of inflammability should insist on the 
prudery of the veil as the civilizing medium 
of his race. 

There has been fun in Bagdad. But there 
never will be civilization where Comedy is not 
possible; and that comes of some degree of 
social equality of the sexes. I am not quoting 
the Arab to exhort and disturb the somnolent 
East ; rather for cultivated women to recognize 
that the Comic Muse is one of their best 
friends. They are blind to their interests in 
swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. Let 
them look with their clearest vision abroad 
and at home. They will see that where they 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 61 

have no social freedom, Comedy is absent: 
where they are household drudges, the form 
of Comedy is primitive : where they are toler- 
ably independent, but uncultivated, exciting 
melodrama takes its place and a sentimental 
version of them. Yet the Comic will out, as 
they would know if they listened to some of 
the private conversations of men whose minds 
are undirected by the Comic Muse : as the 
sentimental man, to his astonishment, would 
know likewise, if he in similar fashion could 
receive a lesson. But where women are on the 
road to an equal footing with men, in attain- 
ments and in liberty — in what they have won 
for themselves, and what has been granted them 
by a fair civilization — there, and only waiting 
to be transplanted from life to the stage, 
or the novel, or the poem, pure Comedy 
flourishes, and is, as it would help them to 
be, the sweetest of diversions, the wisest of 
delightful companions. 

Now, to look about us in the present time, 
I think it will be acknowledged that in neglect- 



62 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

ing the cultivation of the Comic idea, we are 
losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. You 
see Folly perpetually sliding into new shapes 
in a society possessed of wealth and leisure, 
with many whims, many strange ailments and 
strange doctors. Plenty of common-sense is 
in the world to thrust her back when she pre- 
tends to empire. But the first-born of common- 
sense, the vigilant Comic, which is the genius 
of thoughtful laughter, which would readily 
extinguish her at the outset, is not serving as 
a public advocate. 

You will have noticed the disposition of 
common-sense, under pressure of some pertina- 
cious piece of light-headedness, to grow impa- 
tient and angry. That is a sign of the absence, 
or at least of the dormancy, of the Comic idea. 
For Folly is the natural prey of the Comic, 
known to it in all her transformations, in every 
disguise ; and it is with the springing delight 
of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it 
gives her chase, never fretting, never tiring, 
sure of having her, allowing her no rest. 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 63 

Contempt is a sentiment that cannot be 
entertained by comic intelligence. What is it 
but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally 
lofty, or comfortably narrow, not perfectly 
humane? If we do not feign when we say 
that we despise Folly, we shut the brain. 
There is a disdainful attitude in the presence 
of Folly, partaking of the foolishness to Comic 
perception : and anger is not much less foolish 
than disdain. The struggle we have to con- 
duct is essence against essence. Let no one 
doubt of the sequel when this emanation of 
what is firmest in us is launched to strike down 
the daughter of Unreason and Sentimentalism : 
such being Folly's parentage, when it is re- 
spectable. 

Our modern system of combating her is too 
long defensive, and carried on too ploddingly 
with concrete engines of war in the attack. 
She has time to get behind entrenchments. 
She is ready to stand a siege, before the 
heavily armed man of science and the writer 
of the leading article or elaborate essay have 



64 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

primed their big guns. It should be remem- 
bered that she has charms for the multitude ; 
and an English multitude seeing her make a 
gallant fight of it will be half in love with her, 
certainly willing to lend her a cheer. Benevo- 
lent subscriptions assist her to hire her own 
man of science, her own organ in the Press. 
If ultimately she is cast out and overthrown, 
she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks. 
She can say that she commanded an army and 
seduced men, whom we thought sober men and 
safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn 
rather gloomily, after she has flashed her 
lantern, that we have in our midst able men 
and men with minds for whom there is no 
pole-star in intellectual navigation. Comedy, 
or the Comic element, is the specific for the 
poison of delusion while Folly is passing 
from the state of vapour to substantial form. 

O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, 
Voltaire. Cervantes, Fielding, Moliere ! These 
are spirits that, if you know them well, will 
come when you do call. You will find the 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 65 

very invocation of them act on you like a 
renovating air — the South-west coming off the 
sea, or a cry in the Alps. 

No one would presume to say that we are 
deficient in jokers. They abound, and the 
organisation directing their machinery to shoot 
them in the wake of the leading article and 
the popular sentiment is good. 

But the Comic differs from them in address- 
ing the wits for laughter; and the sluggish 
wits want some training to respond to it, 
whether in public life or private, and particu- 
larly when the feelings are excited. 

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by 
habits of punning and of using humouristic 
phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian 
polysyllables to treat of the infinitely little. 
And it really may be humorous, of a kind, 
yet it will miss the point by going too much 
round about it. 

A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some 
years back, at a very advanced age. He had 
been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later 

E 



66 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

years up to the period of his death. There 
was a report of Duke Pasquier that he was a 
man of profound egoism. Hence an argument 
arose, and was warmly sustained, upon the 
excessive selfishness of those who, in a world 
of troubles, and calls to action, and innumer- 
able duties, husband their strength for the 
sake of living on. Can it be possible, the 
argument ran, for a truly generous heart to 
continue beating up to the age of a hundred ? 
Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, 
who likened him to the oak of the forest — a 
venerable comparison. 

The argument was conducted on both sides 
with spirit and earnestness, lightened here and 
there by frisky touches of the polysyllabic 
playful, reminding one of the serious pursuit 
of their fun by truant boys, that are assured 
they are out of the eye of their master, and 
now and then indulge in an imitation of him. 
And well might it be supposed that the Comic 
idea was asleep, not overlooking them ! It 
resolved at last to this, that either Duke Pas- 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 67 

quier was a scandal on our humanity in cling- 
ing to life so long, or that he honoured it by 
so sturdy a resistance to the enemy. As one 
who has entangled himself in a labyrinth is 
glad to get out again at the entrance, the 
argument ran about to conclude with its com- 
mencement. 

Now, imagine a master of the Comic treat- 
ing this theme, and particularly the argument 
on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of The 
Centenarian, with choric praises of heroical 
early death, and the same of a stubborn 
vitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus ; 
and the grand question for contention in 
dialogue, as to the exact age when a man 
should die, to the identical minute, that he 
may preserve the respect of his fellows, fol- 
lowed by a systematic attempt to make an 
accurate measurement in parallel lines, with a 
tough rope-yarn by one party, and a string of 
yawns by the other, of the veteran^ power of 
enduring life, and our capacity for enduring 
him, with tremendous pulling on both sides. 



68 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

Would not the Comic view of the discussion 
illumine it and the disputants like very light- 
ning ? There are questions, as well as persons, 
that only the Comic can fitly touch. 

Aristophanes would probably have crowned 
the ancient tree, with the consolatory observa- 
tion to the haggard line of long-expectant 
heirs of the Centenarian, that they live to see 
the blessedness of coming of a strong stock. 
The shafts of his ridicule would mainly have 
been aimed at the disputants. For the sole 
ground of the argument was the old man's 
character, and sophists are not needed to 
demonstrate that we can very soon have too 
much of a bad thing. A Centenarian does 
not necessarily provoke the Comic idea, nor 
does the corpse of a duke. It is not provoked 
in the order of nature, until we draw its pene- 
trating attentiveness to some circumstance 
with which we have been mixing our private 
interests, or our speculative obfuscation. Dul- 
ness, insensible to the Comic, has the privilege 
of arousing it ; and the laying of a dull finger 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 6.9 

on matters of human life is the surest method 
of establishing electrical communications with 
a battery of laughter — where the Comic idea 
is prevalent. 

But if the Comic idea prevailed with us, 
and we had an Aristophanes to barb and wing 
it, we should be breathing air of Athens. 
Prosers now pouring forth on us like public 
fountains would be cut short in the street and 
left blinking, dumb as pillar-posts, with letters 
thrust into their mouths. We should throw 
off incubus, our dreadful familiar — by some 
called boredom — whom it is our present humi- 
liation to be just alive enough to loathe, 
never quick enough to foil. There would be 
a bright and positive, clear Hellenic perception 
of facts. The vapours of Unreason and Senti- 
mentalism would be blown away before they 
were productive. Where would Pessimist and 
Optimist be? They would in any case have 
a diminished audience. Yet possibly the 
change of despots, from good-natured old 
obtuseness to keen-edged intelligence, which 



70 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

is by nature merciless, would be more than we 
could bear. The rupture of the link between 
dull people, consisting in the fraternal agree- 
ment that something is too clever for them, 
and a shot beyond them, is not to be thought 
of lightly ; for, slender though the link may 
seem, it is equivalent to a cement forming a 
concrete of dense cohesion, very desirable in 
the estimation of the statesman. 

A political Aristophanes, taking advantage 
of his lyrical Bacchic licence, was found too 
much for political Athens. I would not ask 
to have him revived, but that the sharp light 
of such a spirit as his might be with us to 
strike now and then on public affairs, public 
themes, to make them spin along more 
briskly. 

He hated with the politician's fervour the 
sophist who corrupted simplicity of thought, 
the poet who destroyed purity of style, the 
demagogue, 'the saw- toothed monster,'* who, 
as he conceived, chicaned the mob, and he 
held his own against them by strength of 



\ 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 71 

laughter, until fines, the curtailing of his 
Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimately 
the ruin of Athens, which could no longer 
support the expense of the chorus, threw him 
altogether on dialogue, and brought him under 
the law. After the catastrophe, the poet, 
who had ever been gazing back at the men of 
Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he 
had foreseen it ; and that he was wise when 
he pleaded for peace, and derided military 
coxcombry, and the captious old creature 
Demus, we can admit. He had the Comic 
poet's gift of common-sense — which does not 
always include political intelligence ; yet his 
political tendency raised him above the Old 
Comedy turn for uproarious farce. He abused 
Socrates, but Xenophon, the disciple of 
Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the 
Ten Thousand. Aristophanes might say that 
if his warnings had been followed there would 
have been no such thing as a mercenary Greek 
expedition under Cyrus. Athens, however, 
was on a landslip, falling ; none could arrest 



72 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

it. To gaze back, to uphold the old times, 
was a most natural conservatism, and fruitless. 
The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or 
wrong in his politics and his criticisms, and 
bearing in mind the instruments he played on 
and the audience he had to win, there is an 
idea in his comedies : it is the Idea of Good 
Citizenship. 

He is not likely to be revived. He stands, 
like Shakespeare, an unapproachable. Swift 
says of him, with a loving chuckle : 

c But as for Comic Aristophanes, 
The dog too witty and too profane is.' 

Aristophanes was 'profane, 1 under satiric 
direction, unlike his rivals Cratinus, Phryni- 
chus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we 
are to believe him, who in their extraordinary 
Donnybrook Fair of the day of Comedy, 
thumped one another and everybody else with 
absolute heartiness, as he did, but aimed at 
small game, and dragged forth particular 
women, which he did not. He is an aggregate 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 73 

of many men, all of a certain greatness. We 
may build up a conception of his powers if we 
mount Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with 
the songfulness of Shelley, give him a vein of 
Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the 
mantle of the Anti-Jacobin, adding (that 
there may be some Irish in him) a dash of 
Grattan, before he is in motion. 

But such efforts at conceiving one great one 
by incorporation of minors are vain, and cry 
for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading 
man in a country constantly plunging into 
war under some plumed Lamachus, with 
enemies periodically firing the land up to the 
gates of London, and a Samuel Foote, of 
prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, 
I think it gives a notion of the conflict en- 
gaged in by Aristophanes. This laughing 
bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic 
pamphleteer, using laughter for his political 
weapon ; a laughter without scruple, the 
laughter of Hercules. He was primed with 
wit, as with the garlic he speaks of giving to 



74 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. 
And he was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, 
with the homely song of a jolly national poet, 
and a poet of such feeling that the comic 
mask is at times no broader than a cloth on a 
face to show the serious features of our com- 
mon likeness. He is not to be revived ; but 
if his method were studied, some of the fire 
in him would come to us, and we might be 
revived. 

Taking them generally, the English public 
are most in sympathy with this prirmtiye 
Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is 
capped by the grotesque, irony tips the wit, 
and satire is a naked sword. They havejhe 
basis of the Comic in them : an esteem for 
common-sense. They cordially dislike the 
reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though 
it is not the gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros 
sel, nor the polished Frenchman's mentally 
digestive laugh. And if they have now, like 
a monarch with a troop of dwarfs, too many 
jesters kicking the dictionary about, to let 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 75 

them reflect that they arc dull, occasionally, 
like the pensive monarch surprising himself 
with an idea of an idea of his own, they look 
so. And they are given to looking in the 
glass. They must see that something ails 
them. How much even the better order of 
them will endure, without a thought of the 
defensive, when the person afflicting them is 
protected from satire, we read in Memoirs of 
a Preceding Age, where the vulgarly tyran- 
nous hostess of a great house of reception 
shuffled the guests and played them like a 
pack of cards, with her exact estimate of the 
strength of each one printed on them : and 
still this house continued to be the most 
popular in England ; nor did the lady ever 
appear in print or on the boards as the comic 
type that she was. 

It has been suggested that they have not\ 
yet spiritually comprehended the signification 
of living in society ; for who are cheerfuller, 
brisker of wit, in the fields, and as explorers, 
colonizers, backwoodsmen? They are happy 



76 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

in rough exercise, and also in complete repose. 
The intermediate condition, when they are 
called upon to talk to one another, upon other 
than affairs of business or their hobbies, re- 
veals them wearing a curious look of vacancy, 
as it were the socket of an eye wanting. The 
Comic is perpetually springing up in social 
life, and it oppresses them from not being 
perceived. 

Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the guests, 
who happens to have enrolled himself in a 
Burial Company, politely entreats the others 
to inscribe their names as shareholders, ex- 
patiating On the advantages accruing to them 
in the event of their very possible speedy 
death, the salubrity of the site, the aptitude 
of the soil for a quick consumption of their 
remains, etc. ; and they drink sadness from the 
incongruous man, and conceive indigestion, not 
seeing him in a sharply defined light, that 
would bid them taste the comic of him. Or 
it is mentioned that a newly elected member 
of our Parliament celebrates his arrival at 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 77 

eminence by the publication of a book on cab- 
fares, dedicated to a beloved female relative 
deceased, and the comment on it is the word 
' Indeed.' But, merely for a contrast, turn to 
a not uncommon scene of yesterday in the 
hunting-field, where a brilliant young rider, 
having broken his collar-bone, trots away very 
soon after, against medical interdict, half put 
together in splinters, to the most distant meet 
of his neighbourhood, sure of escaping his 
doctor, who is the first person he encounters. 
1 1 came here purposely to avoid you,' says the 
patient. 6 1 came here purposely to take care 
of you, 1 says the doctor. Off they go, and 
come to a swollen brook. The patient clears 
it handsomely: the doctor tumbles in. All 
the field are alive with the heartiest relish of 
every incident and every cross-light on it ; and 
dull would the man have been thought who 
had not his word to say about it when riding 
home. 

In our prose literature we have had delight- 
ful Comic writers. Besides Fielding and Gold- 



I 



78 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

smith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and 
Mr. Elton might walk straight into a comedy, 
were the plot arranged for them. Gait's 
neglected novels have some characters and 
strokes of shrewd comedy. In our poetic 
literature the comic is delicate and graceful 
above the touch of Italian and French. Gener- 
ally, however, the English elect excel in satire, 
and they are noble humourists. The national 
disposition is for hard-hitting, with a moral 
purpose to sanction it; or for a rosy, some- 
times a larmoyant, geniality, not unmanly in 
its verging upon tenderness, and with a singu- 
lar attraction for thick-headedness, to decorate 
it with asses'* ears and the most beautiful 
sylvan haloes. But the Comic is a different 
spirit. 

You may estimate your capacity for Comic 
perception by being able to detect the ridicule 
of them you love, without loving them less : 
and more by being able to see yourself some- 
what ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting 
the correction their image of you proposes. 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 79 

Each one of an affectionate couple may be 
willing, as we say, to die for the other, yet 
unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the 
right moment ; but if the wits were sufficiently 
quick for them to perceive that they are in a 
comic situation, as affectionate couples must 
be when they quarrel, they would not wait for 
the moon or the almanac, or a Dorine, to 
bring back the flood-tide of tender feelings, 
that they should join hands and lips. 

If you detect the ridicule, and your kindli- 
ness is chilled by it, you are slipping into the 
grasp of Satire. 

If instead of falling foul of the ridiculous 
person with a satiric rod, to make him writhe 
and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him 
under a semi-caress, by which he shall in his 
anguish be rendered dubious whether indeed 
anything has hurt him, you are an engine of 
Irony. 

If you laugh all round him, tumble him, 
roll him about, deal him a smack, and drop a 
tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours 



80 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

to your neighbour, spare him as little as 
you shun, pity him as much as you expose, 
it is a spirit of Humour that is moving 
you. 

The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the 
governing spirit, awakening and giving aim to 
these powers of laughter, but it is not to be 
confounded with them : it enfolds a thinner 
form of them, differing from satire, in not 
sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, 
and from humour, in not comforting them and 
tucking them up, or indicating a broader 
than the range of this bustling world to 
them. 

Fielding's Jonathan Wild presents a case 
of this peculiar distinction, when that man of 
eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness 
of a trial in which the condemnation has been 
brought about by twelve men of the opposite 
party ; for it is not satiric, it is not humorous ; 
yet it is immensely comic to hear a guilty 
villain protesting that his own e party ' should 
have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 81 

into villains' ratiocination. 1 And the Comic 
is not cancelled though we should suppose 
Jonathan to be giving play to his humour. 
I may have dreamed this or had it suggested 
to me, for on referring to Jonathan Wild, I 
do not find it. 

Apply the case to the man of deep wit, who 
is ever certain of his condemnation by the 
opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic, 
and will be satiric. 

The look of Fielding upon Richardson is 
essentially comic. His method of correcting 
the sentimental writer is a mixture of the 
comic and the humorous. Parson Adams is 
a creation of humour. But both the concep- 
tion and the presentation of Alceste and of 
Tartuffe, of Celimene and Philaminte, are 
purely comic, addressed to the intellect : there 
is no humour in them, and they refresh the 

1 The exclamation of Lady Booby, when Joseph 
defends himself : * Your virtue ! I shall never survive 
it J' etc., is another instance. — Joseph Andrews. Also 
that of Miss Mathews in her narrative to Booth : ' But 
such are the friendships of women.' — Amelia. 
F 



82 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

intellect they quicken to detect their comedy, 
by force of the contrast they offer between 
themselves and the wiser world about them ; 
that is to say, society, or that assemblage 
of minds whereof the Comic spirit has its 
origin. 

Byron had splendid powers of humour, and 
the most poetic satire that we have example 
of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no 
strong comic sense, or he would not have taken 
an anti-social position, which is directly op- 
posed to the Comic ; and in his philosophy, 
judged by philosophers, he is a comic figure, 
by reason of this deficiency. ' So bald er 
philosophirt ist er ein Kind,"' Goethe says of 
him. Carlyle sees him in this comic light, 
treats him in the humorous manner. 

The Satirist is a moral agent, often a 
social scavenger, working on a storage of 
bile. 

The Irone'ist is one thing or another, 
according to his caprice. Irony is the humour 
of satire ; it may be savage as in Swift, with a 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 83 

moral object, or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a 
malicious. The foppish irony fretting to be 
seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall 
not mistake its intention, are failures in 
satiric effort pretending to the treasures of 
ambiguity. 

The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing 
laugher, giving tone to the feelings and some- 
times allowing the feelings to be too much for 
him. But the humourist of high has an 
embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the 
Comic poet. 

Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, 
and still you brood on him. The juxtaposition 
of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, 
the opposition of their natures most humor- 
ous. They are as different as the two hemi- 
spheres in the time of Columbus, yet they 
touch and are bound in one by laughter. The 
knight's great aims and constant mishaps, his 
chivalrous valiancy exercized on absurd objects, 
his good sense along the highroad of the craziest 
of expeditions ; the compassion he plucks out 



84 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

of derision, and the admirable figure he pre- 
serves while stalking through the frantically 
grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in 
the loftiest moods of humour, fusing the 
Tragic sentiment with the Comic narrative. 

The stroke of the great humourist is world- 
wide, with lights of Tragedy in his laughter. 

Taking a living great, though not creative, 
humourist to guide our description : the skull 
of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of 
festival ; he sees visions of primitive man 
capering preposterously under the gorgeous 
robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on 
fire when we wear solemnity, if we would not 
press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite and 
infinite flash from one to the other with him, 
lending him a two-edged thought that peeps 
out of his peacefulest lines by fits, like the 
lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going 
the rounds at night. The comportment and 
performances of men in society are to him, by 
the vivid comparison with their mortality, 
more grotesque than respectable. But ask 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 85 

yourself, Is he always to be relied on for just- 
ness ? He will fly straight as the emissary 
eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will 
also make as determined a swift descent upon 
the man of his wilful choice, whom we cannot 
distinguish as a true one. This vast power of 
his, built up of the feelings and the intellect 
in union, is often wanting in proportion and 
in discretion. Humourists touching upon 
History or Society are given to be capricious. 
They are, as in the case of Sterne, given to be 
sentimental; for with them the feelings are 
primary, as with singers. Comedy, on the 
other hand, is an interpretation of the general 
mind, and is for that reason of necessity kept 
in restraint. The French lay marked stress on 
mesure et gout, and they own how much they 
owe to Moliere for leading them in simple 
justness and taste. We can teach them many 
things ; they can teach us in this. 

The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or 
enclosed square, of the society he depicts ; and 
he addresses the still narrower enclosure of 



86 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

men's intellects, with reference to the operation 
of the social world upon their characters. He 
is not concerned with beginnings or endings 
or surroundings, but with what you are now 
weaving. To understand his work and value 
it, you must have a sober liking of your kind 
and a sober estimate of our civilized qualities. 
The aim and business of the Comic poet are 
misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor 
his point of view taken, when he is accused of 
dishonouring our nature and being hostile to 
sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making 
an unfair use of laughter. Those who detect 
irony in Comedy do so because they choose to 
see it in life. Poverty, says the satirist, has 
nothing harder in itself than that it makes 
men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridi- 
culous to Comic perception until it attempts 
to make its rags conceal its bareness in a for- 
lorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival 
ostentation. Caleb Balderstone, in his endea- 
vour to keep up the honour of a noble house- 
hold in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely 



THE IDEA OF COxMEDY 87 

comic character. In the case of * poor rela- 
tives,' on the other hand, it is the rich, whom 
they perplex, that are really comic; and to 
laugh at the former, not seeing the comedy 
of the latter, is to betray dulness of vision. 
Humourist and Satirist frequently hunt to- 
gether as Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque, 
to the exclusion of the Comic. That was an 
affecting moment in the history of the Prince 
Regent, when the First Gentleman of Europe 
burst into tears at a sarcastic remark of Beau 
BrummelFs on the cut of his coat. Humour, 
Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their 
common prey. The Comic spirit eyes but does 
net touch it. Put into action, it would be 
farcical. It is too gross for Comedy. 

Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our 
unfortunate nature instead of our conventional 
life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts 
the Comic idea. But derision is foiled by 
the play of the intellect. Most of doubtful 
causes in contest are open to Comic inter- 
pretation, and any intellectual pleading of 



88 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea 
of Comedy. 

The laughter of satire is a blow in the 
back or the face. The laughter of Comedy is 
impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer 
a smile ; often no more than a smile. It laughs 
through the mind, for the mind directs it ; and 
it might be called the humour of the mind. 

One excellent test of the civilization of a 
country, as I have said, I take to be the 
flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; 
and the test of true Comedy is that it shall 
awaken thoughtful laughter. 

If you believe that our civilization is founded 
in common-sense (and it is the first condition 
of sanity to believe it), you will, when contem- 
plating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not 
more heavenly than the light flashed upward 
from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watch- 
ful ; never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in 
the rear ; so closely attached to them that it 
may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its 
features are studied. It has the sage's brows, 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 89 

and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at the 
corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle 
wariness of half tension. That slim feasting 
smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a 
big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the 
brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. 
The laugh will come again, but it will be of 
the order of the smile, finely tempered, show- 
ing sunlight of the mind, mental richness 
rather than noisy enormity. Its common 
aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if 
surveying a full field and having leisure to 
dart on its chosen morsels, without any flut- 
tering eagerness. Men's future upon earth 
does not attract it ; their honesty and shapeli- 
ness in the present does ; and whenever they 
wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, 
pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedan- 
tic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees 
them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to 
run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, 
congregating in absurdities, planning short- 
sightedly, plotting dementedly ; whenever they 



90 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 



are at variance with their professions, and 
violate the unwritten but perceptible laws 
binding them in consideration one to another ; 
whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; 
are false in humility or mined with conceit, 
individually, or in the bulk — the Spirit over- 
head will look humanely malign and cast an 
oblique light on them, followed by volleys of 
silvery laughter. That is the Comic Spirit. 

Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to 
the spiritual, and to deny the existence of a 
mind of man where minds of men are in work- 
ing conjunction. 

You must, -as I have said, believe that our 
state of society is founded in common-sense, 
otherwise you will not be struck by the con- 
trasts the Comic Spirit perceives, or have it to 
look to for your consolation. You will, in fact, 
be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of 
light, yourself illuminated to the general eye 
as the very object of chase and doomed quarry 
of the thing obscure to you. But to feel its 
presence and to see it is your assurance that 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 91 

many sane and solid minds are with you in 
what you are experiencing : and this of itself 
spares you the pain of satirical heat, and the 
bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You 
share the sublime of wrath, that would not 
have hurt the foolish, but merely demonstrate 
their foolishness. Moliere was contented to 
revenge himself on the critics of the Ecole des 
Femmes, by writing the Critique de FEcole des 
Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the play- 
fullest of studies in criticism. A perception of 
the comic spirit gives high fellowship. You 
become a citizen of the selecter world, the 
highest we know of in connection with our 
old world, which is not supermundane. Look 
there for your unchallengeable upper class ! 
You feel that you are one of this our civilized 
community, that you cannot escape from it, 
and would not if you could. Good hope sus- 
tains you ; weariness does not overwhelm you ; 
in isolation you see no charms for vanity ; 
personal pride is greatly moderated. Nor 
shall your title of citizenship exclude you from 



92 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

worlds of imagination or of devotion. The 
Comic spirit is not hostile to the sweetest 
songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: 
Shakespeare overflows : there is a mild moon's 
ray of it (pale with super-refinement through 
distance from our flesh and blood planet) in 
Comus. Pope has it, and it is the daylight 
side of the night half obscuring Cowper. It 
is only hostile to the priestly element, when 
that, by baleful swelling, transcends and over- 
laps the bounds of its office : and then, in 
extreme cases, it is too true to itself to speak, 
and veils the lamp : as, for example, the 
spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of 
Moliere : at which the dark angels may, but 
men do not laugh. 

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that 
the laughter-moving and the worshipful may 
be in alliance : I know not how far comic, or 
how much assisted in seeming so by the un- 
expectedness and the relief of its appearance : at 
least they are popular, they are said to win the 
ear. Laughter is open to perversion, like other 






THE IDEA OF COMEDY 93 

good things ; the scornful and the brutal sorts 
are not unknown to us; but the laughter 
directed by the Comic spirit is a harmless 
wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that 
it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a 
study j as when one of the sudden contrasts 
of the comic idea floods the brain like reassur- 
ing daylight. You are cognizant of the true 
kind by feeling that you take it in, savour it, 
and have what flowers live on, natural air for 
food. That which you give out — the joyful 
roar — is not the better part; let that go to 
good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs. 
Aristophanes promises his auditors that if they 
will retain the ideas of the comic poet care- 
fully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their 
garments shall smell odoriferous of wisdom 
throughout the year. The boast will not be 
thought an empty one by those who have 
choice friends that have stocked themselves 
according to his directions. Such treasuries 
of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert. 
Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a step in 



"^ 



94 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

civilization. To shrink from being an object 
of it is a step in cultivation. We know the 
degree of refinement in men by the matter 
they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh ; 
but we know likewise that the larger natures 
are distinguished by the great breadth of their 
power of laughter, and no one really loving 
Moliere is refined by that love to despise or 
be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be 
that the lover of Aristophanes will not have 
risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace them 
both, and you have the whole scale of laughter 
in your breast. Nothing in the world sur- 
passes in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, 
when Bacchus and Xanthias receive their 
thrashings from the hands of businesslike 
CEacus, to discover which is the divinity of 
the two, by his imperviousness to the mortal 
condition of pain, and each, under the obliga- 
tion of not crying out, makes believe that his 
horrible bellow — the god's iou iou being the 
lustier — means only the stopping of a sneeze, 
or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 95 

invocation to some deity : and the slave con- 
trives that the god shall get the bigger lot of 
blows. Passages of Rabelais, one or two in 
Don Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner 
of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a 
similar cataract of laughter. But it is not illu- 
minating ; it is not the laughter of the mind. 
Moliere's laughter, in his purest comedies, is 
ethereal, as light to our nature, as colour to 
our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the Tar- 
tuffe have no audible laughter ; but the char- 
acters are steeped in the comic spirit. They 
quicken the mind through laughter, from com- 
ing out of the mind ; and the mind accepts 
them because they are clear interpretations of 
certain chapters of the Book lying open before 
us all. Between these two stand Shakespeare 
and Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart 
and mind in one; with much of the Aristo- 
phanic robustness, something of Moliere's 
delicacy. 

The laughter heard in circles not pervaded 



96 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

by the Comic idea, will sound harsh and soul- 
less, like versified prose, if you step into them 
with a sense of the distinction. You will 
fancy you have changed your habitation to a 
planet remoter from the sun. You may be 
among powerful brains too. You will not find 
poets — or but a stray one, over-worshipped. 
You will find learned men undoubtedly, pro- 
fessors, reputed philosophers, and illustrious 
dilettanti. They have in them, perhaps, every 
element composing light, except the Comic. 
They read verse, they discourse of art; but 
their eminent faculties are not under that 
vigilant sense of a collective supervision, 
spiritual and present, which we have taken 
note of. They build a temple of arrogance ; 
they speak much in the voice of oracles ; their 
hilarity, if it does not dip in grossness, is 
usually a form of pugnacity. 

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking i 
outward has deprived them of the eye that 
should look inward. They have never weighed 
themselves in the delicate balance of the Comic 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 97 

idea so as to obtain a suspicion of the rights 
and dues of the world ; and they have, in 
consequence, an irritable personality. A very 
learned English professor crushed an argument 
in a political discussion, by asking his adver- 
sary angrily : ' Are you aware, sir, that I am 
a philologer ? ' 

The practice of polite society will help in 
training them, and the professor on a sofa 
with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may 
become their pupil and a scholar in manners 
without knowing it : he is at least a fair and 
pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But 
the society named polite is volatile in its adora- 
tions, and to-morrow will be petting a bronzed 
soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a 
spiritualist : ideas cannot take root in its ever- 
shifting soil. It is besides addicted in self- 
defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of 
its rapidly revolving world, as children on a 
whirligoround bestow their attention on the 
wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to 
escape from giddiness and preserve a notion 

G 



98 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

of identity. The professor is better out of 
a circle that often confounds by lionizing, 
sometimes annoys by abandoning, and always 
confuses. The school that teaches gently 
what peril there is lest a cultivated head should 
still be coxcomb's, and the collisions which may 
befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is 
more to be recommended than the sphere of 
incessant motion supplying it with material. 

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure 
overhead are rank with raw crops of matter. 
The traveller accustomed to smooth highways 
and people not covered with burrs and prickles 
is amazed, amid so much that is fair and 
cherishable, to come upon such curious bar- 
barism. An Englishman paid a visit of 
admiration to a professor in the Land of Cul- 
ture, and was introduced by him to another 
distinguished professor, to whom he took so 
cordially as to walk out with him alone one 
afternoon. The first professor, an erudite 
entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly 
esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 99 

exclude the dagger) with the vindictive jeal- 
ousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a 
short prelude of gloom and obscure explosions, 
he discharged upon his faithless admirer the 
bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of 
flighty caballeros : — ' Either I am a fit object 
of your admiration, or I am not. Of these 
things one — either you are competent to 
judge, in which case I stand condemned by 
you ; or you are incompetent, and therefore 
impertinent, and you may betake yourself to 
your country again, hypocrite ! ' The admirer 
was for persuading the wounded scholar that it 
is given to us to be able to admire two profes- 
sors at a time. He was driven forth. 

Perhaps this might have occurred in any 
country, and a comedy of The Pedant, dis- 
covering the greedy humanity within the 
dusty scholar, would not bring it home to one 
in particular. I am mindful that it was in 
Germany, when I observe that the Germans 
have gone through no comic training to warn 
them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them 

Ltffc 



100 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

from aloft, nor much of satirical. Heinrich 
Heine has not been enough to cause them to 
smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as 
individually, when they are excited they are in 
danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance, 
they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a 
national outcry because one of German blood 
has been convicted of crime in a foreign 
country. They are acute critics, yet they still 
wield clubs in controversy. Compare them in 
this respect with the people schooled in La 
Bruyere, La Fontaine, Moliere ; with the 
people who have the figures of a Trissotin and 
a Vadius before them for a comic warning of 
the personal vanities of the caressed professor. 
It is more than difference of race. It is the 
difference of traditions, temper, and style, 
which comes of schooling. 

The French controversialist is a polished 
swordsman, to be dreaded in his graces and 
courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, 
or a marching army, in defence of a good case 
or a bad — a big or a little. His irony is a 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 101 

missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits 
like a blast from a dragon^ mouth. He must 
and will be Titan. He stamps his foe under- 
foot, and is astonished that the creature is not 
dead, but stinging ; for, in truth, the Titan is 
contending, by comparison, with a god. 

When the Germans lie on their arms, 
looking across the Alsatian frontier at the 
crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud 
Kami Fritz at the Theatre Francais, looking 
and considering the meaning of that applause, 
which is grimly comic in its political response 
to the domestic moral of the play — when the 
Germans watch and are silent, their force of 
character tells. They are kings in music, we 
may say princes in poetry, good speculators 
in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship. 
That so gifted a race, possessed moreover of 
the stern good sense which collects the waters 
of laughter to make the wells, should show at 
a disadvantage, I hold for a proof, instructive 
to us, that the discipline of the comic spirit is 
needful "to their growth. We see what they 



l^ J^L - WI , .^js^ .^Vw^cx^^cbap-^^ *j*i j .i u4UK.^m 



102 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

can reach to in that great figure of modern man- 
hood, Goethe. They are a growing people; 
they are conversable as well ; and when their 
men, as in France, and at intervals at Berlin 
tea-tables, consent to talk- on equal terms with 
their women, and to listen to them, their 
growth will be accelerated and be shapelier. 
Comedy, or in any form the Comic spirit, will 
then come to them to cut some figures out of 
the block, show them the mirror, enliven and 
irradiate the social intelligence. 

Modern French comedy is commendable for 
the directness of the study of actual life, as far 
as that, which is but the early step in such a 
scholarship, can be of service in composing 
and colouring the picture. A consequence of 
this crude, though well-meant, realism is the 
collision of the writers in their scenes and 
incidents, and in their characters. The Muse 
of most of them is an Aventuriere. She is 
clever, and a certain diversion exists in the 
united scheme for confounding her. The 
object of this person is to reinstate herself in 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 103 

the decorous world ; and either, having accom- 
plished this purpose through deceit, she has a 
nostalgie de la boue, that eventually casts her 
back into it, or she is exposed in her course of 
deception when she is about to gain her end. 
A very good, innocent young man is her 
victim, or a very astute, goodish young man 
obstructs her path. This latter is enabled to 
be the champion of the decorous world by 
knowing the indecorous well. He has assisted 
in the progress of Aventurieres downward ; he 
will not help them to ascend. The world is 
with him ; and certainly it is not much of an 
ascension they aspire to; but what sort of 
a figure is he? The triumph of a candid 
realism is to show him no hero. You are to 
admire him (for it must be supposed that 
realism pretends to waken some admiration) as 
a credibly living young man ; no better, only a 
little firmer and shrewder, than the rest. If, 
however, you think at all, after the curtain 
has fallen, you are likely to think that the 
Aventurieres have a case to plead against him. 



104 THE IDEA OF COMEDY 

True, and the author has not said anything 
to the contrary ; he has but painted from the 
life ; he leaves his audience to the reflections 
of unphilosophic minds upon life, from the 
specimen he has presented in the bright and 
narrow circle of a spy-glass. 

I do not know that the fly in amber is of 
any particular use, but the Comic idea enclosed 
in a comedy makes it more generally percep- 
tible and portable, and that is an advantage. 
There is a benefit to men in taking the lessons 
of Comedy in congregations, for it enlivens the 
wits ; and to writers it is beneficial, for they 
must have a clear scheme, and even if they 
have no idea to present, they must prove that 
they have made the public sit to them before 
the sitting to see the picture. And writing 
for the stage would be a corrective of a too- 
incrusted scholarly style, into which some great 
ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers to a 
definite plan, and to English. Many of them 
now swelling a plethoric market, in the com- 
position of novels, in pun-manufactories and in 



THE IDEA OF COMEDY 105 

journalism ; attached to the machinery forcing 
perishable matter on a public that swallows 
voraciously and groans; might, with encour- 
agement, be attending to the study of art in 
literature. Our critics appear to be fascinated 
by the quaintness of our public, as the world 
is when our beast-garden has a new importa- 
tion of magnitude, and the creature's appetite 
is reverently consulted. They stipulate for a 
writer's popularity before they will do much 
more than take the position of umpires to 
record his failure or success. Now the pig 
supplies the most popular of dishes, but it is 
not accounted the most honoured of animals, 
unless it be by the cottager. Our public 
might surely be led to try other, perhaps 
finer, meat. It has good taste in song. It 
might be taught as justly, on the whole, and 
the sooner when the cottager's view of the 
feast shall cease to be the humble one of our 
literary critics, to extend this capacity for 
delicate choosing in the direction of the 
matter arousing laughter. 



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